WASHINGTON (CNS) — This year’s
National Catholic Prayer breakfast took on a decidedly Kansas flavor, as
Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City and Sam Brownback, a former House and Senate
member and governor of Kansas, addressed nearly 1,000 gathered at a Washington
hotel May 24.

Also speaking was outgoing Speaker
of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, who was a staffer for Brownback in the
latter’s early days in Congress.

“We support the right to
religious freedom,” said Brownback, now the U.S. at-large ambassador for international
religious freedom. It is not because that right appears in the Constitution or the
U.N. Declaration on Human Rights, he said, but “because it’s a God-given right.”

“No government
has the right to infringe upon a God-given right. No government has the right
to do that,” he added to applause.

“It’s important to us because it’s
important to God,” Brownback said. The right to religious freedom is “not in
our DNA, but it’s in our souls,” and all humans have that right “even if we
disagree with their path or destination.”

Despite this, “more people are
being persecuted for their faith right now than at any other time in human
history,” according to Brownback. “God knew before he made us that we would
mess it up — and he created us anyway.”

Brownback began his remarks by
congratulating those in the audience who “fought and fought and fought” for the
right to life. He said that during his six years as Kansas governor, which
ended with his February confirmation to the ambassadorial post, he had “signed
19 pro-life bills, and we had 17,000 fewer abortions in Kansas in those six years
than we had in the prior six years.”

Ryan, who is not running for re-election,
thanked those in attendance “for what do you on this excellent journey.”

He lamented the political
culture in Washington. “‘Survival of the shrillest’ is what some people call us
these days,” he said. It seems, he added, as if everything is viewed “always in
survival mode” and people find intrigue in things “that frankly aren’t all that
intriguing.”

In Washington politics, Ryan
said, “optics” is what counts. “That is a word I will not be missing,” he said
to laughter.

He recommended Catholic social
teaching, sometimes calling it “Catholic social doctrine,” as “the perfect antidote
to what ails our society.”

“As Catholics, there is nothing
more fulfilling than fulfilling our mission with passion, with prayer and with
joy,” Ryan said.

He lauded the twin principles of
subsidiarity and solidarity as the best approach to dealing with issues, rather
than relying on government to solve every problem. With those principles in
hand, Ryan said, “people and problems are not treated as if they’re distractions,”

In his remarks, Archbishop
Naumann, who begins a three-year term in November as chairman of the U.S.
bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, warned that the nation’s most
serious crisis is “a God-crisis — a crisis of faith.”

He
looked askance at “the large number of millennials who profess atheism or, even
more commonly, identify themselves as spiritual, but not religious. This
nonreligious spiritualism is a new paganism, where God is not the God of
revelation who makes himself known to us, but a god or gods that are fashioned
in our own image to reinforce our own desires.”

Archbishop
Naumann said, “It is this loss of a sense of God that also leaves us vulnerable
to losing sight of the innate value of each and every human being.” It promotes
a culture in which “human life becomes just another thing in a world of things.
Materialism reigns and breeds utilitarianism; our value is determined by our
usefulness,” he said.

“We are called to renew our
nation, not primarily by enacting laws, but by announcing the joy and hope of
the Gospel of Jesus to individuals in desperate need of its good news. It is
our task to reclaim our culture — one mind, one heart, one soul at a time,” Archbishop
Naumann said.

To do so, he added, we need
Jesus. “Jesus defeats humanity’s twin enemies, sin and death, by walking
through death to eternal life. We believe in a God who died but is far from
dead. The triumphant, risen Lord is still animating the lives of those who open
their hearts to encounter his love. Thus for the Christian, we are never
without hope,” the archbishop said.

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